Keeping himself busy with the standard preamble, he finally looked over again at his potential suspect. "I'm going to cut to the chase, Mr. Driscoll. I understand you were at Carla Markham's house in the late afternoon through the evening on the day her husband was killed."

"Yes. That's true."

"Do you remember what you did later that night?"

Obviously the question was unexpected, and resented. "What I did? Why?"

"If you could just answer the question."

"Well, I can't just answer the question without a reason. Why would you want to know what I did later that night? I thought you were coming here to talk about Dr. Ross or Dr. Kensing, that maybe Mr. Elliot had come upon something in what I'd given him."

"Jeff Elliot? What did you give him?"

Driscoll had to some degree recovered his aplomb after the insult. "Some of my files from work. Evidence, I would suppose you'd call it. Although the grand jury didn't seem interested when I talked to them."

"You think these files contain evidence relating to Mr. Markham's death?"

"Absolutely. Of course they do. They must."

"And do you still have copies here?"

Driscoll hesitated for an instant, then shook his head. "No. I gave them all to Mr. Elliot."

Bracco didn't believe this for a moment. "And yet you thought I was coming over here to discuss them with you?"

"I thought you must have talked to him."

"No." Bracco met Driscoll's eye. "But maybe I should."

"On second thought, he probably wouldn't show them to you. Sources, you know. But I could call him and get them back, then let you know."

"That might be helpful," Bracco said. "Or we could get a search warrant and go through them ourselves."

Driscoll was shaking his head, supercilious. "You're way late, Sergeant. Ross has erased all the good stuff by now. Everything about him and Tim, anyway."

"But you say you had it and gave it to Jeff Elliot?"

A self-important shrug. "I didn't read it all, but some of it was certainly provocative, if you know what I mean. He was definitely firing Ross, you know?"

"Markham?"

"I'm sure he was taking kickbacks for putting drugs on the formulary. Tim got wise to it, too, after Sinustop. He just needed more proof before he could accuse him directly. But if you read between the lines, you can see it. It was over between them."

Bracco decided not to press anymore with Driscoll the issue of whether he'd kept copies of his files, or what might be contained in them. He'd come here today to talk about the Tuesday night, and he returned to that topic. "I'm still wondering about after you left the Markhams'."

A petulant glare, then a sigh of capitulation. "All right, then, I came home here."

"Thank you. And what time was that?"

"I'm not sure. Nine, nine thirty. You have to understand that my world had just fallen apart. I wasn't keeping track of the time very well."

A brusque nod. "Were you alone?"

Brendan brought a hand to his forehead. He closed his eyes for a long moment. "Yes. Roger was working late, which he's been doing all the time recently. But I called him and he was just crunching numbers, no clients at that time, and we could talk. At least we could talk. It had been the worst day, just the worst. I almost went down to his bank just to be with him, but he told me he'd be coming home."

"You called him at his bank after you got home at nine thirty?"

"Yes. I was so upset, just so upset."

"Did you and Roger talk a long while?"

"I don't know. It seemed too short, but you know how that is. I just couldn't tell you how long it was. Honestly."

Ross didn't have any kind of trouble remembering. He told Fisk, "I was talking with Jeff Elliot here in the office until late-I don't know the exact time, maybe nine o'clock, something like that. It had been the day from hell, I'll tell you. Then he finished with me-although he didn't really finish with me until he'd written that fucking column-and I realized I'd hit the wall, so I got in my car and went home."

Fisk's young and earnest face clouded over. "So you got home about nine thirty?"

"Yeah, something like that. Is there a problem with that?"

Fisk scratched behind his ear. "Only, sir, that I think your wife said something about you getting home after midnight that night."

Ross gave it some more thought, then let out a humorless chuckle. "No. She's got it mixed up with another night. I've been getting home at midnight so often lately, she probably thinks that's my regular hours. But it wasn't anywhere near there. Maybe ten, tops."

Glitsky had put off taking care of some of his administrative duties as long as he could, but this morning he came in and began. For three hours, he'd been caught up in such minutiae as collating the mileage run up by his inspectors on city-issue cars. Now he was chewing on the last dry bit of rice cake and sipping the dregs of his tea, which had attained room temperature. So he was in a suitably cheerful mood when Marlene Ash knocked on his door as she was opening it.

He sat back gratefully, pushed the paperwork aside. "You broke him," he said.

She closed the door quietly, then turned back to him and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest. "Pending verification of his alibi, which I'd expect in the next few hours, Dr. Kensing is no longer a suspect, at least for Carla's death. And that means Markham's, too, I'd suppose."

Glitsky squinted up at her, shook his head. "He doesn't have an alibi."

"He didn't tell it to you. He wanted the secrecy protection of the grand jury."

"As though I'd tell anybody?"

"He wanted to be sure."

"And you believe it. What was it?"

Ash uncrossed her arms and took one of the folding chairs across from Glitsky's desk. "You know the story of the man in the Old West who was sleeping with his best friend's wife at the time of the murder and got hanged because he wouldn't admit that's where he'd been? It was something like that, except it didn't involve sleeping with anybody."

"He was someplace he shouldn't have been?"

"Close enough, Abe. And about as far as I want to go, even with you. If this gets out later, and it always might, I want to be able to say I never told a soul. I believe it, rock solid. He didn't do it."

Still way back in his chair, Glitsky sat with this new reality for a long beat. "This is one of the few times, Marlene, when I see the value in profanity. You're truly satisfied he couldn't have been at Carla's? Who's going to check this out?"

"Not at ten forty-five, Abe. Unless that time is squishy and I have an investigator out checking now."

But Glitsky had taken Hardy's information, then gone back himself to talk to Frank Husic. He considered that man's testimony to be unimpeachable, and Carla's time of death established. If Kensing hadn't been there at 10:45, he was innocent. He'd give a lot to know precisely where the doctor had been, but knew he wasn't likely to get it from any source, and certainly not from Marlene Ash. "Thanks for the heads-up," he told her. "You got anybody else you like?"

"Not really, Abe. I'm talking to the accountant and maybe a couple of board members this afternoon. I've got to broaden the net and make some progress on the money side or Clarence is going to be unhappy. He's already going to be unhappy that his deal with Dismas got us nothing of any substance."

"It got me something," Glitsky said ruefully. "I didn't arrest him, which is starting to look like a good idea."

This was unarguable, and Marlene went on. "Well, anyway, I've subpoenaed all of their financial records for the past three years and we'll see who can explain them satisfactorily. I'm going to have the grand jury take the fraud issue head-on. Then maybe I'll get back to the murder indictment, but for now my priority…"